BACKGROUND INFORMATION
As you receive feedback, from your instructor, for each milestone, you should reflect on their comments and make appropriate changes for your Executive Summary. In most organizations, reports go through several layers of review and revision before being "finalized."
These activities address the following Module Outcomes:
Estimate queue performance given a variety of customer and process parameters. (CO#1, CO#4, CO#6)
Evaluate processes with impatient customers using the Erlang Loss Model. (CO#1, CO#4, CO#6)
PROMPT
In the final project, you have just been selected to be the Operations Manager at a large phone manufacturing company, Phones4U. You have only been on the job for six days when you are tasked, by the Vice President for Operations, to "fix" one of Phone4U''s manufacturing plants in Shanghai, China. The plant''s production levels have been dropping for the last three years. You eagerly arrange your travel to Shanghai. When you arrive at the Shanghai plant, you are greeted by the local plant manager, Zhang Wei, who has been with Phones4U for 8 years. Zhang Wei presents you with data on the plant. This data has been used in competing Milestones 1-3 throughout this course.
TASKS
For your Final Project, you should submit the following deliverables:
1. A Performance Improvement Summary, incorporating the analyses from previous milestones, concepts you have covered in the course, and research you have conducted. The Performance Improvement Summary should include the following sections:
a. Executive Summary (briefly describe analysis efforts and include a Final recommendation from Milestones 1-3, limit to 1-2 pages).
b. Common manufacturing challenges Shanghai is currently facing (this will require some market research).
c. Potential future manufacturing challenges in Shanghai (i.e. - as GDP goes up, how does that impact manufacturing costs, what about raw material availability, etc.), including any assumptions you have made.
d. Any recommended mitigations for potential future challenges, you should include at least two and no more than four.
e. Personal reflection on the Final Project. What did you learn? What would have made the project more effective? What struggles did you have? This part of the report does not have to link to the Performance Improvement Summary, but should be contained within the same document (use "insert page break after the "Recommended Mitigations for Potential Future Challenges" section of the report).